Angry coalition seeking solutions for Gateway woes

STOCKTON - When the $2.7 million Gateway project opened a dozen years ago, it was hailed as transformational for the blighted corner of Lafayette and Center streets.

Kevin Parrish

STOCKTON - When the $2.7 million Gateway project opened a dozen years ago, it was hailed as transformational for the blighted corner of Lafayette and Center streets.

A coalition of angry merchants, downtown residents and Chinese community leaders met Wednesday morning to ask: Gateway to what?

As far as they're concerned, their corner of Stockton is worse than ever.

All the problems of street crime, public drunkenness, homelessness, drug use, lewd behavior, vagrancy and mental health boiled to the surface during a sometimes-testy meeting at Mi Ranchito Cafe.

A new group, calling itself the Stockton Gateway Coalition, met with representatives of the Police Department and City Councilwoman Dyane Burgos to express frustration over increasing lawlessness in their neighborhood.

"We're tired of it," said David Garcia, who helped organize the meeting and whose family owns the restaurant. "We deserve better. We've had enough."

About two dozen people, including four police officers, gathered at tables in a side room.

"I'm worried about the seniors," said Albert Louie, outgoing president of the Chinese Benevolent Association, "and the dangers caused by those who defecate on the sidewalks. They shoot out the lights so they can do their business. Lafayette Street is still part of the city of Stockton."

Louie said the sidewalks are like open latrines.

Others described scenes of drunks passed out in the street, open drug sales and use, urination on the walls of businesses, public buildings and residences.

Garcia, who spoke Tuesday night in front of the City Council, is angry. He pointed to Mariani's Liquors on El Dorado Street as a source of many of the problems.

Daniel Dixon, owner of Mariani's and several other businesses, responded, "We tried Prohibition in the 1930s. I am a convenient target."

Dixon said he and his family had been fighting "this war for the last 30 years."

Garcia told the council that Center Street south of the Crosstown Freeway was Stockton's "skid row."

Burgos kept the two dozen participants focused on the meeting's purpose and, in the end, helped them focus on the possibility of aligning in the future with the Downtown Stockton Alliance and on conducting a second meeting in early December.

Police Lt. Tony Sajor, a lifelong Stockton resident, and Mark Stebbins, a representative of the South Stockton Merchants Association, explained the roots of the bubbling problems:

» The closure in the mid-1990s of the old Stockton State Hospital, which housed patients with mental illnesses. "It left no place for police officers to take those needing help," Sajor said. "Shooing them is like sweeping without a dust pan. We need to work with social services." Many on the street still suffer from mental-health problems.

» The dismantling of homeless shantytowns along nearby Mormon Slough over the past two years. Those people, said Stebbins, have scattered.

» Police Department staffing reductions, part of City Hall's overall fiscal crisis, resulted in the suspension of narcotics and bike patrol units. Stockton filed for bankruptcy in July 2012 and expects to exit that status next summer.

» The inability to relocate migrant day laborers from a Center Street parking lot shared by McDonald's and a Union 76 gas station. Both were original Gateway tenants.

» The closure of aging downtown hotels almost a decade ago. "Those folks became homeless," Stebbins said. Others described them as "bums and panhandlers."

Sajor, saying he appreciated the patience of those impacted by unsavory activity on their doorsteps, also was hopeful City Hall would begin restoring police services over time. The passage Nov. 5 of Measures A and B have made that possible.

Admitting the magnitude of Stockton's homeless problem is greater in the Gateway area, Sajor said, "They are also in Spanos Park West and in Morada."